Brainpickin – set up your own online video-based courses

If you’re intrigued by the success of the likes of Khan Academy, and want to have a go at setting up your own educational video site, then Brainpickin is a new online service that aims to get you up and running (presuming you have the content). The platform is free to use, and allows you to run video-based courses, either free or you can charge for them in exchange for giving Brainpickin a chunk of your revenue.

How good this service will turn out to be, and whether the company succeeds remains to be seen – the really interesting thing is that services like this are springing up in response to the current MOOC frenzy. This kind of service is a pretty obvious thing to get into right now, but it depends on learners being willing to pay for self-published online courses, which could be tricky given the quality available for free from the likes of Coursera and Udacity.

What does this mean for ELT? Well, there’s no MOOC for ELT yet. But there are thousands of people with their own English language teaching content looking for an outlet. This could be an interesting and (one would hope) easy way to test the waters and gain some experience in developing online courses at no cost. And that may further the cause of online learning in ELT.